Lost in translation

There's nothing more interesting than learning a new language, every day is a new achievement and it breeds a strong vanity free pride when you can start to construct a sentence when only two or three weeks ago you could not communicate with a soul. There are so few people in this village that can speak English and even those that can have never met a native english speaker. This is where the fun starts.

So I am giving my host father a brief lesson in English, now there are so many words that the Georgian people just find hilarious for the sake of being hilarious, such as "pig" and "chicken" why they are funny, I don't know but they create a lot of mirth. More entertainment can be found when you try to teach new words, I teach words everyday to my family here and they repeat those words and the pronunciation is so bad with certain words as they do not have the sounds we have in their own tongue. That's not to say I don't ruin their language.... I do! very much so, and also get laughed at a lot. So we spend many a night sitting round the fire laughing at how useless we are at communicating with each other. However, this is such a great feeling, because I can't understand their jokes so it's an oportunity to laugh... and know what I'm laughing about. haha.

Then I try to teach the days of the week. There's only seven, how hard could that be............... VERY!

My family here now only remember one word and they say it wrong! Monday (which they pronounce Mundi!) It's taking me over a week to find out why this is so funny as no one would tell me what it means, but this means arse in their language, but let it be it's more funny than Monday any way!

However, the icing on the cake has to go to Ala, my co-teacher, who was inquiring about the pronunciation of certain words today. We spend a lot of time teaching each other and just generally improving our accents and understanding of the other's language. However, today, about two minutes before we had the grade 5's she asked me about the word "can't"... and it was genius, I was laughing for about ten minutes of the lesson.

"So you pronounce that c*nt yeah?"
"...... er no, definitely not! I pronounce it carn't" (creasing with laughter at this point)
"So not c*nt then?"
"no.... that means something entirely different ala"
"is this one of those regional words where many people say c*nt but you say can't?"
"many people do say c*nt, but they don't mean can't"
"so I need to change to can't?"
"I strongly advise you do, just incase you need to say to someone 'you can't' as saying 'you c*nt" might just upset people"
"oh! so what does it mean?"
"not everything needs to be translated!"

GENIUS!!!!!!!!